


How Ardently I Honour You

by inkblotsandteapots



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Regency, F/M, Regency Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 17:17:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21019400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkblotsandteapots/pseuds/inkblotsandteapots
Summary: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a large fortune, must be in want of a life.The Honourable Brienne Tarthalways assumed her life would be that of a spinster. Her father, the Viscount of Tarth, would remarry and reproduce, leaving Brienne to ride and read as she always had. When her father dies without leaving an heir, however, some distant male cousin gets her father's title and land. Taken in by Lady Stark, Brienne sets her mind on marriage, deciding that using her husband's power is the only way she may have a say in the future of her small island town. If only Lady Stark and her father hadn't been so insistent upon her finding a happy marriage rather than simply one of convenience...Lord Jaime Lannister, the future Marquess of Casterly Rock, is not a well-liked man. Dry and with a prickly temper, his status has not saved him from scorn after he killed Lord Aerys Targaryen in a duel at dawn...before the other man drew his pistol. Torn between his father's insistence that he marry and his sister's pleas that he does not, Jaime decides to appease them both by dancing an eligible lady, though one he'll surely never marry. How very convenient, indeed...





	How Ardently I Honour You

**Author's Note:**

> So I've written something like twenty drafts of the next chapter of my Dirty Dancing AU fic and just wasn't happy with any of them, so I decided to do some freewriting to help unblock those pathways. Lo and behold, I now have this mid-length regency romance AU to create. I love romance, though (regency and historical romance in particular - Courtney Milan is the latest obsession) and had so much fun with this first chapter. I should point out that with the concept of the mystery serial-writer, I'm vaguely adopting the framing device from Julia Bridgerton's 'Bridgerton' series, although that is a gossip column and this is a fictional serial, so it shouldn't resemble that plotline much at all. 
> 
> Also thank you very much to my friend Ynna for beta-ing this. She is a delight.

Brienne Tarth knew that it was widely considered a woman’s duty to marry, and she had nothing if not her sense of duty.

She simply wished sometimes that being dutiful was not so very boring.

Take this one particularly drizzly Thursday afternoon, for example. She was already in a foul mood because the rain coming down in sheets from the sky had stopped her from taking her usual morning ride, and when she didn’t ride, she always felt somewhat compressed, like somebody held their hands on her chest and were pressing down, trapping the air flow and squeezing her heart.

She’d tried not to show it, however, because Bran and Rickon kicked up such a fuss when the butler, Lewin, told them there was to be no riding that day, Brienne was fairly sure the whole of Kent heard their howls of protest. Lady Catelyn had hauled both boys into the drawing room by their ears and they’d emerged ten minutes later looking sullen, yes, but also far more sheepish than they did before. So, Brienne tried to conceal her own displeasure. She couldn’t set a bad example to the boys, especially not after their mother had taught them a lesson, and besides, she didn’t really fancy getting her ears boxed, either.

Her great show of maturity and unwillingness to do anything other than smile graciously and nod, however, was how she’d ended up taking tea with Lady Catelyn and her two daughters. And taking tea, of course, was how the topics Brienne awaited - with dread sat like a stone in her stomach - came up.

Debuts and dance cards, refusals and rakes, eligible (and unfortunately not so eligible) men. In short, _marriage_.

“I should like to wear my green dress this Saturday, Mother, and perhaps we could ask Septa Donelle for some matching ribbon for my hair? Unless…” Sansa looks very seriously around at the rest of the group which is comprised of Brienne, Lady Catelyn and Sansa’s younger sister, Arya, “unless you think that’s far too much.”

“I’m sure you’ll look lovely whatever you decide, darling,” Catelyn says. She has a crisp, efficient way of speaking that leaves no possibility of anyone suggesting otherwise.

Anyone, perhaps, other than Sansa. The girl’s brow remains puckered with worry. “But what if I look desperate? I couldn’t bear to look desperate.”

“That’s what we all are though, aren’t we?” pipes up Arya. Brienne is impressed she’d been listening. Arya still has a year before her first season and often spent these ‘little talks’ as Catelyn called them sneakily feeding the cat under the table or tracing shapes on the clouded window of the drawing room. “Desperate, that is. It all seems rather ridiculous that young ladies go to these balls looking for a husband, everyone knows that they’re going to look for a husband, and yet we all have to pretend that the last thing we’re trying to do is…”

“Look for a husband,” Brienne murmurs. Arya claps her hands in delight that Brienne was playing along with her moment of drama. The sudden movement causes the family cat, Pod, to dart out from beside Arya with a disgruntled mewl, or as much of one as he could deliver around the wad of ham Arya had clearly gifted him. Brienne almost laughs out loud.

“Exactly,” Arya says, hastily shooing Pod away under her mother’s glare.

Sansa throws up her hands in frustration, the first time she has shifted from her carefully elegant positioning (ankles crossed, hands resting daintily on the knee) for a half hour, and looks immediately furious with herself for it. Brienne feels a shred of guilt lodge itself in her conscience. She knows how seriously Sansa takes this, how seriously she herself _must_ take it. Yet it seems rather silly for Sansa to be worrying at all. The eldest Stark daughter is a beauty, all rich red hair and huge eyes and a complexion that many publications refer to (rather ridiculously, Brienne thinks) as peaches and cream. And even if she hadn’t been beautiful, her dowry certainly was. She would have no problems. Brienne on the other hand…

Lady Catelyn’s eyes cut to her with such sharpness that Brienne jumps, momentarily fearing that the woman had read her thoughts.

“What are your thoughts on this season, Brienne?” she asks softly. Brienne feels a flush of pride at the use of her given name. It is as though Lady Catelyn truly counted her as one of her wild brood.

“I think your mother’s right,” she says to Sansa quickly. “You have nothing to worry about. Take it from a spinster,” she adds, with a weak jab at humour that gets a wan smile from Sansa none the less.

Lady Catelyn is all frowns at the comment, however. “You’re not a spinster at four-and-twenty Brienne.”

“Oh, no, well it’s not…”

But there is no stopping Lady Catelyn once she had something she felt had to be said. Brienne secretly thinks that she's more similar to her youngest daughter than she suspected in that respect. “In fact, I am confident that this season will be a triumph for you. You are worlds away from the nervous girl you were when you made your debut. You couldn’t even hold my eyes, then. Now look at you.”

She looks at Brienne with a fierce, maternal sort of pride that makes her chest ache. Brienne has actually been working on conversation this year, forcing herself to meet eyes rather than glance away; to accept compliments with a gracious smile rather than stuttering as her face turns an alarming shade of red. It’s not that she has a desire to be considered society’s wittiest and prettiest, exactly. She’s never minded being thought of as vacant or stupid or shy by everyone else, not as long as she herself knew who she was beyond the panicked silence that seemed to lodge itself in her throat during social gatherings. She is not in fact vacant or stupid (though the shyness lingered wherever she went), so what did it matter if people said she was so? But this year…well, this year she is trying. For Catelyn to notice it, to recognise it, made some of the frustrated tears Brienne had shed to get to this point seem worth it.

“Besides,” Catelyn says, after a sniff to compose herself, “I promised your father that I would see to it that you are happy, and I intend to honour that promise.”

The warmth that had been rising in Brienne’s chest seems to sputter out like a dampened flame. Lady Catelyn had certainly made good of all the promises made to Lord Selwyn Tarth as he’d lain on his deathbed ten months prior, with only a small island town and a single daughter left to carry his memory. She had taken Brienne in and treated her with such affection and care that the only thing telling Brienne apart from the Stark children was the blonde hue of her hair. She had hired a lawyer to secure as many funds as Brienne could successfully claim, and had her husband and his brothers travel a fortnight out to Tarth so they could make it very clear to the distant cousin who’d become the island’s bumbling heir that Tarth was in Brienne’s blood and his claim could not wash it away with the next Tarthean tide.

But this promise to make Brienne _happy._ Brienne did not like to criticise a dead man, especially not one as fine as her father (and Selwyn Tarth had been a very fine man indeed), but he had handed the poor Lady Stark an impossible task.

Not the marriage part. It was true that some harsh things had been said about her appearance. Brienne is certainly not going to be lauded as the classical beauty that Sansa no doubt will be. No woman who towers over every man on the dance floor could be seen as such, not with the awful pride that seemed to be inherent in every man she came across. It did not matter. Brienne’s face is hers, and her height is hers, and looks did not matter when it came to marriage, not with a decent size dowry and a respectful family name to boot. But a _happy_ marriage. She almost had to laugh. The two proposals she’d had thus far had been from men who had told her, in no vague terms, how very unhappy they were at the prospect of marrying her, and though Brienne had tried to hold her tongue against the stream of curses that fought to break free in answer, she was rather certain that leaving the men lying on the dusty ground clutching themselves in agony had got the point across. She would not have been happy marrying them. She’s not sure she’d be happy marrying at all.

Nevertheless, she would do her duty. It’s all she has, now. Duty and mildly improved conversational skills. She just wishes Lady Catelyn wouldn’t worry herself sick trying to do the same on her behalf.

“Lady Catelyn…” she begins, but any gentle admonishment she could deliver is cut off by Arya’s yelp of delight as Lewin brings in the local paper.

“I brought it straight to you as you requested, Miss Stark. Not even the eldest Mr Stark got his hands on it before you did.”

“I always knew I was your favourite, Lewin!” Arya crows, grabbing for the paper. She’s such a small girl that when she unfolds it, it takes almost all her wingspan to keep the thing flat in front of her face.

“I didn’t know you’d taken to reading the paper, Arya,” says Lady Catelyn at the precise moment Sansa raises her eyebrows in perfect innocence and says, “I didn’t know you could read.”

Brienne just sits back and sips at her tea with a grin brewing on her face. As much as Lady Catelyn had insisted on her being a member of the family, Brienne had always fancied herself as more an observer than a participant, and there was no one more interesting to observe than the three forces of nature that were the Stark women.

“I don’t read the paper, exactly,” Arya says to her mother after shooting her sister a rather obscene gesture around the paper. “I don’t trust what any of the things say. But the new serial in ‘The Kentish Town’ is just marvellous. I’ve dreamt of knights and battles all week…”

“Oh, ‘Ser Nymeria the Bold’? By that Blackfyre fellow?” Sansa asks, unable to hold on to her lofty expression as a bright-eyed one of curiosity takes its place.

“Mr Duncan Blackfyre,” Arya says, and Sansa nods enthusiastically.

“Jeyne was telling me about that. She is quite in love with Ser Galladon. He’s the hero isn’t he?”

“She’s the hero,” Brienne corrects. Sansa’s brows draw together in confusion, so she sets her tea down to explain further. She had tried to show more restraint than Arya – it didn’t seem right to make requests of the Stark family butler like he was her own – but she’d been glancing up the garden path to watch for the postman all morning. “Ser Nymeria is a lady knight. I think it’s meant to be satirical, in a way, switching the roles that men and women usually play. In last week’s paper, it was she who rescued Ser Galladon from the tower.” Feeling excitement of her own stir in her chest, she cranes her neck to read alongside Arya. “Oh, do let me see.”

_Ser Nymeria had been called many things in her life. A lady, a wanton, a shameful girl. A knight, a soldier, a servant of the crown. Yet nobody alive would, or indeed, had, dared to name her a coward. How could they when they saw her ride into battle with a cry that made the earth shake beneath her feet and a glare that made Death himself _ _decide it simply did not dare to take her today, and went to busy himself with a cup of tea instead (or a strong brandy, as Nymeria’s glare was truly a thing to behold)._

“A woman in battle?” Sansa interrupts. “That would never—”

“Hush, Sansa,” says Catelyn, who has joined the huddle around the paper and has a pair of spectacles perched on her nose. “It’s fiction.”

_“Do you surrender, my lady?” asked the first of the thugs. He leaned against the pommel of his sword, which he’d speared into the earth at a jaunty angle. Nymeria’s jaw clenched at such careless misuse of a weapon__. A sword was no child’s toy, yet this man treated it as such. “We have no wish to harm a… _gentlewoma_n__.” His spoke the final world like a curse. His two accomplices chuckled and leered behind him, and Nymeria felt fear’s cold touch at her chest. She held it there, embracing it. If she kept her fear close, they would not see it._

_“You are condemning an innocent man to die.” _

_Ser Galladon growled from the position where the other two thugs had forced him to the ground, his wrists behind his back. His hair was caked in mud and grime, but his eyes shone like gemstones_ _ in their hatred as he looked up at his captors. _

_“You are condemning yourself to the same fate, by standing in the way.”_

_“Give me my sword,” Galladon grunted, doing what Nymeria felt was a rather excellent expression of a whiney child. “We’ll settle it between us. The lady should not have to fight.”_

_“Lady?” The first thug roared with laughter, spittle dangling from his rotten teeth. “You call this a lady?”_

_And though Nymeria was tired and famished and had spent the past three days with the most irritating and talkative man in existence as a travelling companion, she surged forward and brought her sword up, disarming the head thug’s hastily raised weapon with ease and knocking him to the ground with a sharp hit of the pommel to his temple. She was on the other two men before they could pick their jaws up from wherever they’d fallen on the forest floor. She got another _ _down with a sharp blow to his left ear and managed to pivot just as the final man caught her ankle with shaking, sweaty fingers, and she wrenched it from his grip with enough force to send him face down to the ground. _

_Nymeria placed a foot very thoughtfully between his shoulder blades and pressed down, light as a feather._ A ladylike touch, one might call it_, she thought with a wry smile._

_“I, ser, am a knight,” she said quietly. “You may tell your companions that when you awake.” And with that she repeated the first move, bringing down the pommel to his temple with enough force that although he would wake up eventually, it would be to an exceptional headache and an even more exceptional bruise_.

_Ser Galladon stared at her. She’d thought he was handsome when she met him, all lush dark hair and a mouth like a bow, but it was hard to appreciate that when this very mouth was gaping in shock as his gaze darted between her and the three unconscious bodies on the floor. Nymeria almost giggled. Her self-restraint must have been obvious, for Ser Galladon’s gaze tightened as he pushed himself to his feet._

_“We should tie them up. Or at least take their horses.” His sour expression shifts into a malicious grin. “Imagine the look on their faces when they awaken to discover not only were they bested by a woman, but robbed by one, too.”_

_Nymeria glared. “You sir, have no honour.”_

_“And you, my dear Miss Lady Knight, have no sense of humour.” He smiled tightly. “So this should be a delightful journey for the both of us.”_

“Excuse me, my lady,” says Lewin, his lips twitching with amusement at the sight of the four women huddled around the paper like children huddling around the fire for a bedtime story. “This also arrived for you.”

He hands Lady Catelyn a letter. The envelope looks heavy and creamy and has a beautiful, slightly rough texture that Brienne wishes to run her fingers over. The wax seal is dripping and deep red, so much so that Brienne blinks, momentarily convinced Lady Catelyn has sliced herself on the paper.

The emotions that flit across Lady Catelyn’s face occur in such quick succession it leaves Brienne dizzy trying to keep up with interpreting them all. A brow raised in surprise becomes one furrowed in thought; a smile becomes a determined pout. Both Sansa and Arya look at Brienne with huge eyes. She offers them a reassuring smile, more out of instinct than anything. 

“My dears,” Lady Catleyn says with a barely concealed smile. She looks positively girlish, Brienne thinks, and she can’t stop her own grin forming to match, even as she feels her heart stutter in her chest, her throat close slightly with this nervous apprehension, this surety, that something – something – is about to change. “Tywin Lannister has arrived in town. He has invited us to a ball he is hosting in celebration this Saturday.”

The room explodes. Sansa lets out a squeal that Brienne thinks that only the dogs in the kennels are likely to hear properly. Arya slaps the newspaper down onto the table, scaring poor Pod out of his newfound refuge curled around the right table leg. Brienne blinks several times in rapid succession, doing what she imagines is a rather good impression of an owl. She knows the Lannisters. Knows of them that is; knowing one’s local lords had seemed prudent back when her father was hoping to somehow install her as heir. Yet something about the way the name resonates leaves a bitter taste in her mouth that even a quick swig of tea cannot wash away, and she cannot remember why for the life of her.

“You hate the Lannisters!” Arya protests, jumping to her feet.

Catelyn fixes her with such a steady look that the girl slinks back into her seat like a grumpy cat. “I would never do such a thing. Hate is such a strong word. It shouldn’t be used in polite conversation.”

“You used it in distinctly impolite conversation as I recall”, mutters Arya, and Brienne has to admire her courage to continue poking at that particular fire. “Something about how Tywin Lannister is the – strike through - coldest man you’ve ever been so – strike through - misfortunate to meet.”

“Strike through?” echoes Brienne.

“She used some very strong words I shan’t repeat. They shouldn’t be used in polite conversation.”

Brienne and Sansa giggle, and Brienne is impressed that Catelyn manages to cling to even a semi-convincing glare, though Brienne is certain she sees an amused light in the older woman’s eyes.

“Be that as it may,” says Catelyn, “I do not feel the same way about _all_ Lannisters. They’re an old family, a well-bred family. Tywin Lannister may be one of the richest men to set foot in this town, so to speak of hatred around him would be very unwise, indeed.” At this offers Arya a pointed stare.

“Besides,” she says, eyes slyly sliding to her eldest daughter, “he has two sons of marriageable age, and several cousins and nephews aside.”

Sansa’s squeal of excitement is cut off by Arya’s howl of protest: “She can’t marry the Kingslayer!”

_Ah_. That single moniker is like a key to some deep recess of Brienne’s conscious, and it all comes back to her in a flood of colours and the tangy-sweet smell of strawberry lemonade. The Kingslayer. Of course.

She vaguely recalls visiting Casterly Rock for the heir and his twin’s eighteenth name-day. She was ten at the time, just beginning to hit the growth spurt that would have tailors and maids alike shaking their heads in despair at her constantly bare and mud-stained ankles, but she remembers two of the Lannister children clearly nonetheless.

She had to know Jaime Lannister, of course, as the heir to Casterly Rock and the surrounding areas, but his twin, Cersei, was just as famous for being the most coveted beauty in England. People said she’d almost married a prince, and Brienne could certainly see it, for the girl she’d spied in the centre of the floor looked like she’d been plucked from the book of fairy tales her father used to read her and dropped down in the middle of a party that she was far too ethereal and otherworldly to understand. Long blonde hair that fell just right, hands that moved delicately, as though each gesture was a dance. Since Brienne had been a girl, she’d always been drawn more to the knights in storybooks than the princesses. It wasn't that she didn’t like the princesses, exactly. She just could never quite get a grasp on them, could never understand them in the same bone-deep way she understood the knights. _Brienne _had never had a way with words or nature, had never possessed a dainty, delicate air, and could not go one day in a tower without going positively mad. Knights, Brienne could understand, because knights tried to be good people, which was surely a universal way of living one's life that was not restricted to the just the fairest in the land. Brienne was taught that princesses were beautiful, and knights were whatever they wanted to be. A foolish lesson, perhaps; princesses certainly had to be capable women if they were to remember as many facts and figures about their people and land as Brienne had to recall about Tarth, but it was what had been drummed into her since she'd been old enough to pick up a book. Plus, thanks to her new height and the early onset “changes”, as her septa put it, that led to her hair growing lank with grease and pimples erupting on her face in a way that was just rather painful, she’d got into a fair few fights with boys in town. She felt she could take on a good joust now. Just had to get hold of a lance.

“She looks like a princess,” Brienne had whispered to Sansa, who at four years old was about a third of Brienne’s height and just nodded her head vigorously in agreement to whatever the elder girl said, red locks bouncing. “And he,” at this she nodded to Jaime Lannister, who stood at his sister’s side, a gentlemanly hand at her elbow, “looks like a prince. All golden.”

Sansa had gotten bored of the waxing lyrical and pointed at the Lannister crest engraved about the doorway. “Lions. Lions say roar.”

“Yes,” Brienne had agreed, watching the way the Lannisters stood together like a feral pack, hair a thousand shades of blonde. When people were kind, they called her hair blonde, but more often than not it was mousy. As a mouse, she had been told not to look a lion in the eye, lest they bite. Yet she could not take her eyes away. “Golden lions.”

Her fairy-tale vision of the Lannisters had been rather nastily trampled upon the following year, when Jaime Lannister challenged Duke Aerys to a duel that left him dead by midday. The duel had been exciting until news spread that Aerys hadn’t been holding a pistol as he died, meaning that Jaime had shot an unarmed man. His sister had also been present and, everyone shuddered, surely far too delicate to witness such things. How could a good brother, how could a good _man_, do something so awful?

Duke Aerys was not a king, but he might as well have been for all the influence the Targaryens wielded. A throne without a king is a question that must be answered, and when push came to shove, all fingers pointed to Jaime Lannister. The Kingslayer.

“Certainly not,” Catelyn agrees, pulling Brienne from her reverie. “He could have all the money in the world, and I would not grant him my daughter’s hand.”

“Nor I,” echoes Arya.

“Nor I,” repeats Brienne with more feeling than she has all day. Even if she cannot marry for love, then she at least wishes to marry an honourable man – a man who, though probably disinterested, respected her enough not to bring shame and injustice to their doorstep.

“However, there’s the other brother, and the nephews besides,” says Sansa thoughtfully.

“Is it true he’s little?” Arya asks with great interest. “How does he dance with the women?”

“You are absolutely forbidden to ask him that,” Catelyn grounds out. “And besides, darling, you’re not exactly on the tall side yourself, are you?” With Arya sufficiently cowed and scowling, she adds, “If the brother doesn’t work out, I quite like the look of the nephew. Joffrey. He’s about your age, darling. Very handsome lad. Lady Cersei’s pride and joy.”

Sansa glows at the news. Truly, she glows. Brienne worries they’ve put something in her food. She makes a silent vow to herself that she will not let a Lannister approach Sansa without Brienne by her side for the whole season. Brienne gave up on fairy-tales around the time she gave up on good men, yet Sansa still seems convinced that her world operates under some sort of storybook governing system.

“I must go and speak to Septa Donelle about those ribbons,” Sansa says, shooting to her feet with an enthusiasm that makes Brienne smile. She misses this Sansa: excited, hyperactive Sansa; the Sansa that wasn’t preoccupied with being the perfect lady every minute of every day.

Lady Catelyn rises and takes her daughter’s elbow. “I’ll accompany you, dear. I wish to make sure the measurements are all right. Good afternoon, girls.”

Brienne and Arya chorus a farewell in return.

“Will you attend the ball?” Brienne asks Arya, who immediately pulls the alarmingly pudgy Podrick back onto her lap the second her mother’s skirts swish out of the door.

“I doubt Mother or Father will permit it.” She shrugs and seizes the paper once more. “Besides, who would want to dance with Jaime Lannister? I would end up quoting Ser Nymeria to his face. You have no honour, Ser.” She lunges for the table, grabs a candle from the stick and wields it threateningly at Brienne. Brienne rolls her eyes, trying to maintain some of the adult sensibility Catelyn could probably implore her to have around Arya, but the girl is doing such a ridiculous imitation of a parry, twirling the candle between her fingers like a baton, that Brienne can’t keep it up. She reaches for a candle of her own, flourishing it in the younger girl’s face with just as much flare until Arya is in pieces giggling.

“Ser Nymeria is certainly right as far as Lannister is concerned,” Brienne agrees, quickly plucking the candle from Arya’s grip before it breaks and wax litters all over the carpet. “No honour at all.” 

“I pity the woman who ends up with him.”

Brienne knows she should admonish the young girl for her words, but she doesn’t. Not when the very same words lingered unspoken on her own lips. “I do, too.”

*

At that very moment, across town, a man with no honour sinks into a bath, hissing as the steam gently works its way into his aching muscles. He can hear his pulse grow slow and sluggish in his ears, every beat of blood through his veins echoing a thought back at him. _Cersei. Heir. Marriage. Father. Tyrion. Aerys. Wife. Aerys. Aerys. Stares. Gossip. Aerys. Aerys. It all comes back to Aerys. _He takes a breath and submerges his face beneath the water, hoping to drown the thoughts for good.

*

That evening, the writer with the pseudonym of Mr Duncan Blackfyre of the Ser Nymeria chronicles bites the knuckle of their thumb thoughtfully, wincing at the sharp taste of ink.

The first line is always the hardest, they think. Always the most unpredictable. Dragging their thumb from their lips, they set pen to paper and begin to write.

_Nymeria rarely believed in regrets, but she truly believed she may regret saving Ser Galladon _ _by the time their journey came to its blessed end._

_“Why the long face, my lady?” he called out, pausing on the title. “You’re beginning to take on a disturbing likeness to my horse.”_

_“You shall take on the disturbing likeness of a dead man if you continue,” she muttered, more to sooth herself than anything else._

_“I heard that!” His laughter bounced off of the trees. “My, you have a dreadful temper for a delicate young girl.”_

_“You have a delicate temper for a dreadful old man,” she snapped, tiredness and hunger and battles bruises leaving her bones feeling heavy in her own body. “So I suppose we are well matched, ser.”_

_He was silent for another quarter of a mile or so before responding. “Yes, Ser. I suppose we are indeed”._

The author pauses to catch their breath. Sometimes, when writing flows, it feels as though they’re running, sprinting, desperate to catch the characters before they slip out of their grip and their consciousness. They read over the beginning again and smile.

Yes, this will do. This will do very nicely.


End file.
